The geek tends to see himself as anarchic-libertarian. But technocratic and elitist would be closer to the truth.

That's brilliant. Should be the footer on every slashdot page.

I shouldn't say they can't -- I should say they are unwilling.

I totally agree with the MS problem but I think they can't. Ten years ago they should have got away from everything that Windows had become and start again but they were too scared they would lose their base customers on the way. It shows they were insecure about their product and thought that it was a success they couldn't repeat again - too dependent on a naive market. Instead they came up with the compromise way forward (fix it - let's make Vista) and got terribly stuck as the complexity of the task overwhelmed them.

I used to work for xxxxx many years ago and we had a massive joint project with Sony to create an open reel digital multitrack standard. It failed ultimately but I did learn of the prejudices of the Japanese engineers. Even then (late 80s) the word was that Sony was making deliberately short-lived consumer products which reflected the extremely fast turnover of their domestic market. In the rich parts of Tokyo you could (apparently) retrieve fully working VCR's etc from trash - things discarded for the latest model. Sony I think built this planned obsolescence into their products as they thought consumers were not interesting in having a VCR work for say 5 years.

Probably the peak of Sony design was late70s to early80s and since then it's been laurel-resting and marketing. I too miss the old Sony but I guess Apple have taken that now.

Yeah absolutely. I'm an audio engineer for over 20 years now and when I started Sony owned the broadcast equipment market. Then some time during the nineties we began to realise that this stuff was going wrong *a lot*. Their DAT players although standard in many ways failed like no other brand. Panasonic took over that one and I changed my preferences to only buy Trinitron products - which in the CRT days were the best. Then they started failing quite badly too - but not before they'd mugged me for a large multisync CRT that died after about three years. Something very wrong with Sony and has been for years.

I was writing apps for the Macintosh in the late 80s. They always were called applications on the Mac, even then.

I think app is pretty cool actually and seems about right for what it is.

Lawn, etc.

no mod points but well said...

C'mon let me know. Did RTFA lol.

The vast majority of this torrent has got to be (badly optimised) GIFs. They should do a version without those included which would be interesting all the same.

Damn, I'm back to remembering when Adobe Imageready 1.0 came out . . . .

And I thought they were trying to kill Flash too.

I had the same situation last year and compromised with a 2048x1152 Samsung display. You don't miss the 48 'missing' pixels at all. It's called QWXGA in the VGA naming scheme. All my Nvidia cards have no problems with this res either.

Depressingly I remember the AGT from when it was new. Used one at a computer fair when I was 12 in amazed mode.

Totally agree. Never, never buy anything from Belkin - they are shockingly bad in most of what they do.

Don't forget runners and so on can get hooked on endorphins. I cycle a lot and am familiar with this. I think it is a type of addiction that has a chemical mechanism.

"Glenn Beck is an idiot, and one of the biggest reasons this country is falling apart. "

He may be an idiot but he isn't that important. By your logic if the people then rounded on him and killed him then everything would be ok. Try it and see ;-)

OSX had .zip compression from day 1 IIRC.